


yours, this spring and after.

by phosphorous



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: A Grand Total of Two Flashbacks, Adam Slander But That's Between Me And God I Think, And Oh My God They Hold Hands, Canon Compliant, Content Warning: Alcohol, Gen, Joe Is A Pro-Yearner But Plot Twist So Is Cherry, M/M, Post Ep 9 Study, Y'all Rocking With Icarus And The Sun As A Metaphor For Love With The Potential To Be Requited?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 22:47:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30146736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phosphorous/pseuds/phosphorous
Summary: In life, some things are absolute. The depth of the ocean is endless and the earth has a solid core. Stars die eventually. Wheels on a skateboard get weary with age and growing up feels like the ground caving underneath the soles of your shoes and then building itself up from nothing until you’re standing tall and whole again. Kaoru has always been the sun, big and bold and full of life. Kojiro, flightless by nature and clutching a pair of man-made wings to his chest, has always been Icarus.
Relationships: Nanjo Kojiro | Joe/Sakurayashiki Kaoru | Cherry Blossom
Comments: 29
Kudos: 124





	yours, this spring and after.

**Author's Note:**

> content warning: alcohol, mentions of adam-related violence, brief description of injury

Back then, boys of seventeen years or less were toy soldiers laid atop the palm of Adam’s gravel-bruised hands, and the story behind the splinters in their bodies was always the same: Adam thought he’d seen a sliver of the garden of Eden in the fissures of their fractured wooden bodies, and he’d crack them open with his bare hands only to realize his Eve was an illusion, and leave them injured beyond repair when he moved onto the next one without so much as an apology. This was always the scene at the bottom of the metaphorical stairwell: broken bones and bloodstained skin, splintered boards and the sound of wheels on rock moving farther and farther away, and at eighteen, a part of Kojiro had once wondered if seeing what Adam did to people once he got bored of them would ever get easier.

It never did, and now the scene at the bottom of the metaphorical stairwell is this: Kaoru is a toy soldier and he has broken bones and bloodstained skin and he’s fucking heavy when he lets Kojiro hold him, and Miya is clutching onto Carla as she glitches between lullabies and calculating the angle of the next turn. In the distance, the Matador laughs, mocking and airy, loveless and empty, and the sound of it grates like bruised wheels on rock.

“I didn’t think he’d do it,” Kaoru murmurs. The hand that isn’t folded over his chest is clutched into the collar of Kojiro’s jacket, marble fingers pressed against the fabric like he’s sinking and it’s a lifeline, and there’s blood dripping down his face in rivers. Miya visibly flinches at the sound of his voice, his face twisting into something terrible in the faux-sunset lights as they trudge down the road, and it looks like the only reason he doesn’t say anything is because he looks like he might cry the moment he opens his mouth.

Kaoru weighs as if his skin and bones are all the years between them, heavy with the spaces left by the losses they’d cut and the things they’d gained in the time before Adam and then after him. It stings to look at his face, so bloody and wrecked in a way it never had been when they were young and suffering the worst of their beginners’ injuries, and the sight of the blood on his face is harrowing.

“Stop it, Four-Eyes,” Kojiro says, for the lack of anything better to say, and an apology burns in his throat like he’s swallowing lumps of hot coal, because Kaoru might have been optimistic enough to see the ghost of their old friend in the line of Adam’s retreating figure the day he turned his back on them like they were playthings he was no longer fond of, but he never had been that way. He’d picked up enough people with broken bones from various places by then to know that Adam was long gone. It was Kaoru who thought otherwise, who thought of redemption and repentance and forgiveness where Kojiro could hardly stand the sight of Adam’s hollow smile when he’d left. “You’ll make your injuries worse by talking. So shut up, okay?”

_I want him to stop hurting people,_ Kaoru had once said, and now his arm is broken and it’s a miracle that he gets to keep all his teeth inside his mouth, and there’s blood on his skin that stands out like apple peels on cold stone.

“Okay,” Kaoru says, clearly too disoriented to argue. The gloved fingers twisted into Kojiro’s jacket tightens by a fraction, a silent _don’t go, don’t go_ etched into the action, heavy like all the words that often went unsaid when it came to them even after with the distance between their shoulders stitched together by the years when it was them against the world. Walking down the rocky path, Kaoru in his arms like a broken toy soldier, Kojiro finds that the scene, is much, _much_ uglier when it’s someone you love laying bloody and bruised at the bottom of the metaphorical stairwell.

Afterwards, all that remains of that horrible night are a series of bandages running in odd places in Kaoru's battered body, a splint in his left leg and another in his right arm. The one that hurts the most to look at is the bandage on the left side of his face, running up from his jaw and stopping just short of the hollow set of his eye socket, precisely at the point where the sharp end of Adam's board had made contact with him.

"Stop looking at me like that," Kaoru says, dismissive as ever when he notices Kojiro's eyes linger a little too long on the side of his face. He’s tired and it’s obvious in the strained line of his shoulders and the grey-blue discoloration under his summer-sun eyes. He lies right through his teeth when he adds, "It doesn't hurt as much as you'd think it does, you know."

"You'd say that even if you lost a limb while skating," Kojiro says. The wine doesn't go down easy when Kaoru is sitting in front of him and he's bruised right down to the skin stretched over his knuckles. Scrapes and cuts heal up, skin folding over open wounds until all that’s left is a scab and then a scar, but broken bones seem jarringly permanent. On the other side of the counter, Kaoru’s arm is bent and his jaw is bruised and he looks smaller than he has in years. _I’m sorry,_ it makes him want to say. Instead, he reaches over the counter, re-fills Kaoru’s glass and asks, “What did he say to you?”

Rather than seeing it, he feels the way the words turn Kaoru into ice.

“Why do you think he said anything?” He asks, a question for a question, and the impassive neutrality to his voice means nothing since the fingers of his uninjured hand is turning white against the glass. It’s a dead giveaway that whatever it was, it wasn’t kind. It never is. Kaoru’s eyes are bronze suns turning dull in the off-white of his sclerae. He lies right through his teeth when he says, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think it ever did.”

It’s high school all over again. Kaoru at seventeen, knees pulled to his chest and sitting by the peach tree by the science building, no skateboard in sight as he idly watches the blossoms fall onto the green field. Kojiro next to him, eighteen years old and folding blades of grass over one another in a criss-cross motion, telling him, _maybe if you talk about it you’ll feel less_ _like shit_ _, Pinky._ Kaoru sneering at him, something twisted and something pained, something visceral and something sour, _th_ _ere’s nothing left to say. It doesn’t matter_ _anymore_ _._ A long, long silence that stretched like the infinite expanse of the sky above them, black and blue all at once.

It had made him want to apologize then too. That Adam had left, that Kaoru had felt cut-off, that Kaoru didn’t want to skate as much when there was no one beating him to the finishing line by mere minutes, that Kojiro wasn’t the person he wanted to see, not like this, never like this, but that he was the only one he had. An apology wouldn’t have brought Adam back from the states or made Kaoru feel less abandoned by someone he considered a friend, but it had burned in his mouth like it burns in his mouth now.

Then, he’d said instead, _let’s go skating tomorrow,_ and Kaoru, seventeen years old and still struggling to understand when the boy he’d admired so much had turned into a monster who pushed people down a metaphorical stairwell, had taken the out. Much had gone unsaid.

And this time, he reaches for the empty bottle and says instead, “Your turn to get the next bottle, Four-Eyes,” and Kaoru, bruised fingers going slack around the round body of the glass, exhausted and blue in all the wrong shades, takes the out. Much will go unsaid.

“You’d make someone who’s bound to a wheelchair make the trip to your cellar, muscle-head?” Kaoru sneers, and the way the twist to his mouth makes something in Kojiro seize like he’s watching the world sink and surrender, at least, hasn’t changed. “This is why you’re twenty seven and unmarried.”

Much will go unsaid. Much always goes unsaid, but lonely in different ways in incapable of words in others, neither of them ever leave.

(At nineteen, he’d ventured out to the world with pieces of Okinawa cradled in his hands and all of them reminded him of Kaoru in some shape or form.

The bracelet on his wrist was a gift from first year of high school. The scrap of paper pressed behind the clear case of his phone, right next to the bi pride sticker his housemate had given him, has Kaoru’s parting words to him scribbled on it: _Bon Voyage, ugly_ , in near cursive. A calligrapher’s handwriting, unshaken and fancy despite how drunk he’d been when he’d written it to begin with. His board always seemed to lead him to the left side of the road, because Kaoru always preferred the right when they skated together. That, he’d found, was what it meant to be in love alone and be resigned to it.

It was spring the year he went back to Okinawa and at twenty four, he’d known this: home had never been a place so much as it had always been the boy who didn’t love him back. Everything in the world always seemed to come back to Kaoru and the way the gold of his eyes reflected in the sun and the way his laugh sounded like the shifting pebbles suspended in the salt of the sea and the way he was the sky and the stars and everything in between. He’d known it was this way the moment he’d seen scenery so lovely that it almost seemed unreal and thought that he’d collect pieces of it like shards from a fractured mirror and bring them home to Kaoru if he could.

So, he’d gone back. He’d gone back and at twenty four, Kaoru was bigger and broader than he used to be in high school, grown up in a way that Kojiro had missed. He’s a mosaic of the years they’d stuck together and of the years they’d spent oceans apart, hair the color of spring and eyes the color of the sun but taller and without bits of metal against pale skin. Still beautiful to the point of unfairness, still Kaoru.

Even when he’d left, a part of Kojiro had known that there wasn’t a force in this universe that could teach him how to un-love his best friend.

Kaoru, leaning against the wall of Kojiro’s house, had waved at him, twenty four years old and still the perfect height for his shadow to melt into Kojiro’s on the concrete roads if they skated side-by-side.

“Hey, shit-face,” he’d said, and held his board up with an almost-smile that twisted itself around Kojiro’s heart like it was a rope, and it sounded entirely too close to _welcome home_ when he asked, “Wanna skate?”

Everything in the world always came back to Kaoru and the way the gold of his eyes reflected in the sun and the way his laugh sounded like the shifting pebbles suspended in the salt of the sea and the way he was the sky and the stars and everything in between.

“You’re going down, Pinky,” Kojiro had said, and it had felt like coming home, the way Kaoru looked like spring pressed into the shape of a person amidst the changing winds of the earth.)

At some point in the night, Kaoru turns over with his uninjured arm tucked beneath the lines of his ribs and Kojiro’s mattress, startlingly sober despite the alcohol he’d downed earlier, and says, hollow and bitter: “I can’t fucking sleep.”

Kojiro, almost warm with sleep on the couch across the room from him, blinks back to focus at the sound of his voice, and asks, half-joking and half-serious: “What, you want me to hold you or something?”

“Yeah, but you have to shut the fuck up,” Kaoru says, and then flops off his uninjured arm and onto his back like he isn’t in a sickening amount of pain from breaking hospital protocol. “I don’t want to hear you speak any more than I have to.”

“Get out of my house, then,” Kojiro says, but gets up anyway.

This used to be a thing years ago, when they were young and close enough to be in each other’s spaces without everything being complicated and strange. At thirteen, Kaoru was the same height as him and had cold limbs even in summer, and he had the nasty habit of kicking Kojiro when he eventually did fall asleep. They’d still wake up in a mess of elbows and knees in the mornings, stuck to each other like glue and annoyed about it like cats in sunlight.

“Don’t drool on me,” Kojiro tells him, settling into the empty space Kaoru leaves when he shifts back against the wall. Their arms brush together, hospital-blue against cotton candy red, and Kaoru relaxes like the tension is being drained out of the line of his shoulders. “It’s unbecoming.”

“Don’t fucking snore, dingus,” Kaoru says. Kojiro turns his head towards him just slightly, and even bruised, there’s a softness to his face, an odd sort of beauty to the line of his nose and then his mouth. Still beautiful to the point of unfairness, still Kaoru. “The neighbors would like to get their eight hours, I think.”

“Shut up, princess.”

“You first, Shrek the Third,” Kaoru says.

Kojiro doesn’t remember falling asleep, but the next time he wakes up feels anywhere between minutes or hours later. Kaoru has his eyes closed. He isn’t lying on his back and still keeping his leg elevated. Their hands touch first, Kaoru’s skin bitterly cold like always, and then Kaoru links their fingers together, like it’s winter and summer and spring and autumn all at once. It feels like falling and flying simultaneously when he says, quiet and careful like the words are only meant for him: “You don’t have to be sorry for any of it. Thanks for staying.”

In life, some things are absolute. The depth of the ocean is endless and the earth has a solid core. Stars die eventually. Wheels on a skateboard get weary with age and growing up feels like the ground caving underneath the soles of your shoes and then building itself up from nothing until you’re standing tall and whole again. Kaoru has always been the sun, big and bold and full of life. Kojiro, flightless by nature and clutching a pair of man-made wings to his chest, has always been Icarus.

It’s a good thing, Kojiro supposes, that the sun was fond enough of Icarus to meet him halfway when he eventually did set flight. It’s a good thing indeed.

**Author's Note:**

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